I have entered counseling. Okay, well not really (although I'm sure most of you think I should). Do you know the downside of growing up with a bunch of chicks? That, no matter how old you get, they still get to control the television. And they always wanna watch chick shows. I'm more familiar with Lifetime (aka the chick channel) and WE television that I would like to be thanks to all these chicks. But there is also the occasional upside. Sometimes the shows they force me to watch actually add some kinda information to my life. Such is the case with a show about boot camp style marriage counseling. While I'm not altogether sure I trust the therapists on the show, they are an intense old guy married to what appears to be a younger woman who is his second in command, they do make some good points about this marriage business. They preach the usual 'be a team' stuff that you always hear but they're dealing with couples who are on the verge of divorce and need to be shocked back into reality. Much of what their counseling for these peeps entails is trying to shock them into working out their issues, which are sometimes petty. They took them to a divorce lawyer and explained the process and who would likely be awarded what if they chose to divorce at this moment. You would think that being confronted with losing someone you love in such a dramatic way would bring them back down to earth and remind them how much they love each other. But no. There are something like five couples on the show and four of them chose to fight over money or child custody while in the mock divorce scenario. One wife even brought up how her stay-at-home husband lost custody of his son from a previous relationship after the lawyers told her he would likely get their daughter in a split (the kicker is that it wasn't his fault he lost the kid, his ex took off and he couldn't find her). Only one couple actually got the point of the exercise and decided on the spot that they could not lose each other and would apply themselves to the counseling biz. Another exercise saw one spouse get into a coffin before the other one was brought in to give a mock eulogy. They each had to write letters to each other prior to this and the "living" partner had to read their letter in the past tense, then the "deceased" had to respond from their heart and off the top of their head. The point was to remind them how much they loved each other and how they would feel if that person was definitely gone. The results were mixed. Some of the "dead" folk refused to speak from the heart, even as their spouse was in tears talking about how much they loved them. Mrs. Personality, who had brought up her husband losing his son, refused to do the exercise at all, even after they explained to her that it was for her husband's benefit and not hers. On the one hand, I couldn't really blame her since it was a bit of a morbid thing and because I would NEVER do that. But my refusal has to do with my past. Hers was just stubbornness.
I'm a little fascinated by two of the couples on this show, which is weird considering their issue is alleged cheating and I've never really had to deal with that. The first is Mrs. Personality and her husband, a very overly emotional dude a lot of the time. I mean, dude cries A LOT. I remember seeing the show that chronicled their trip to the altar (thanks again ladies in my life who have ruined me) and thinking back then that it wouldn't last. He's over a decade older than her but it's clear who wears the pants in the family. She was like 22 when they got married, he was pushing 40 and suspicious about what she was doing in her free time. She was a bit of a party girl and he was concerned that she wasn't ready to be a wife because she was still in her college phase, going out most nights and usually without him. They lived together but she never, under any circumstances, let him see her phone or social networking profiles. She took her phone everywhere with her and hid it when they were asleep. Obviously something was going on that she didn't want him to know about, but he never did anything besides protest and then run away with his tail between his legs when she scolded him for it. His family told him to cut her loose. His friends practically begged him not to marry her. But he went through with it and four years later they have a child and are in marriage counseling. And she still refuses to let him see her phone. He says he's gotten a hold of it a few times and answered calls that were in her contacts under female names but it was a dude when he picked up the phone. Sometimes she gets texts or calls from these same pseudonymed people at two in the morning. Something ain't right there. And he knows it, but he can't prove it and has resigned himself to the fact that she's probably cheating but that doesn't matter to him because "no one can protect her better than I can and I'll kick those dudes asses". Well isn't that productive. In reality, I think he married her and refuses to leave her because he's now north of 40 and doesn't think he can do any better. His wife is just stone cold though, no emotion exists within that chick. Another couple also have the same issue but with the roles reversed, the wife thinks the husband is cheating because he never lets her see his phone either. The thing about it is that the dude is slick, no one can really gauge whether he's actually cheating or if he's just withholding his phone to screw with his uber-controlling wife. She also assumed pre-marriage that he was cheating and pointed to one incident in particular where she sent him out to get something at the store and he was gone for three hours without a word. After that she instructed everyone they knew to text her if they ever saw him out with another woman, regardless of who the woman was. Now she says she gets calls at work during the day saying that he's out and about with other chicks, but she's never actually caught him with one. I thought he was probably just messing with her for his own amusement until the therapists took them aside and said to him point blank that he had to choose between his wife and his phone, the former meaning he allows her to see everything on it and the latter meaning she would leave him. They handed him his phone and told him to make a choice and he deleted every single thing on that phone on the spot. Dude got all kindsa yelled at, and rightfully so. It's just ridiculous that these peeps say they're in love with their spouse but are willing to lose them over something as trivial as a cell phone. I've never had an issue with someone I've dated seeing my phone, provided they ask and aren't just picking it up and going through it without my knowledge. I also wouldn't have an issue with someone seeing my social network stuff. I mean, I write for all the world to see anyway and I don't hold anything back so of course I have no problem with that. But someone refusing to even leave their phone on the counter for fear that their partner will see a text or call...that's not a good sign. Things are either open or they're not.
Shockingly, I'm actually learning stuff about marriage with this here show. Sometimes they make good points. One of the most recent exercises talked about how our relationships with our parents will eventually have an effect on our partnerships. They said this is inevitable, it will happen at some point, even if your childhood was great. Because at the end of the day, our parents have had the most significant role in shaping who we become. This is nothing new obviously, we all know that if you grew up in a violent household, you're more likely to be prone to violent relationships. If you grew up with a white picket fence, you're more likely to be prone to keeping up appearances in your relationships. But there are a million little extremes in between those two scenarios. For example, my childhood was pretty damn great but not at all white picket fence. My relationship with my mother is fantastic and always has been. My relationship with my father was non-existent right up until his death. Despite this, I held no hostility towards him. At least, I didn't think so. But after his death I realized that, while I still do not think my life would have been enhanced had he been there, I would have liked to confront him just once and ask why he left. I suppose that's inevitable when you're a kid whose parent chose to walk away. There's that tendency to feel not good enough or not worthy of someone's love. And that has followed me quite a bit in my romantic relationships. Certainly, the events in my early twenties play into the abandonment and unworthiness issues that I feel, but I'm sure some of it is rooted in childhood. Since I was a kid, I've stopped my mind from wandering to the 'why didn't he want to stay' place. But I think it took root anyway. And I think the moment it did was when he stopped calling after the one time we met him. Because it was like being rejected twice over; he had no interest in staying during the pregnancy or coming around after the birth and then, to top it all off, he actually did meet us and then just dropped off. I wasn't technically around for the first rejection but I remember the second one all too well. And even though I never really knew the guy, it still stung because we are taught that our parents are the only people on the planet who should truly love us unconditionally. So now I have a problem accepting someone else's unconditional love. I'm always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Yeah, this person loves me now and we get along great but how long before they get tired of me or realize I'm a lost cause and walk away? And it's not just romantic relationships, I do this with friendships too. So the tendency is to stop it before the rejection happens. If I lose touch with someone, I don't tend to pick it up again on my own because what if they actually wanted to lose touch? My issues manifest stupid little ways like that. Even though my relationships usually end for other reasons, this is always still in the front of my mind when going into them. Which is probably why I'm more attracted to complex people, people who have been through something significant in their lives that changed them in some way. I've only ever dated one person who came from the white picket fence scenario and a large reason that it didn't work out was because she had no demons to speak of and didn't fully understand mine. We couldn't relate to each other well at all. But it gave me an education in how our childhoods affect our futures. My mom has always been a fan of the saying, 'children learn what they live'. And that's very true. But we also learn what we never had the chance to live and wonder how it would have been different.
